play. Not only did the ancients adeptly describe the problem; they also prescribed a way of dealing with it.
“That's great, Phil. If you can write down a few of those ideas just the way you told me, I'll do the rest.”
“Write it down?” I muttered, then thought to myself, Easy for you to say. But before I could say something I'd regret, I felt some resolve return to my voice for the first time in a long time.
“Sure, just give me a few days.”
For the next few days, I wrote down a flurry of thoughts about Sisyphus on the blank index cards I always carried with me to the painting sites. Around four o'clock, when the cold fog began blowing in from the Pacific Ocean and made it hard to hold onto our paintbrushes, I packed up and headed home, where I wrote until dawn.
By the end of the week I had a thirteen-page essay to send off to my brother. Afterward, I felt as if an enormous burden had been lifted from my shoulders.
I wouldn't know it for many years, but that serendipitous call woke me up from a long, potentially dangerous slumber. Writing about Sisyphus unleashed years of pent-up creativity. His story was my story; his struggle was my struggle. In those benighted days there was tremendous pressure on me from my family, from old friends and new, to become successful, famous, productive. It's the All-American way. If you choose the contemplative life, decide to drop out for awhile, it tends to trouble the people around you. One girlfriend confided to a buddy that I was “a diamond in the rough,” but she wasn't sure if she could hang around long enough to see me all polished. Another asked me, sotto voce, one day when I was going to grow up and get a real job.
However, I held out, stubbornly. Then one night, I got a package of old Life magazines in the mail from my father. Tucked inside one of them was a postcard asking me to tell him one more time exactly what it was that I was writing because his friends kept asking him what I was doing with my life. I had no idea what to tell him. How could I describe the uncanny feeling of being pulled forward by a dream, an image, a story, even my destiny, for so many years, but had somehow lost sight of it? Well, I couldn't. I sensed he was ashamed and couldn't come right out and say it. Hadn't he recently confided to my sister that he was afraid that I was throwing my whole life away? I felt like an utter failure after reading his cryptic note, and my heart sank like a stone. A stone rolling to the bottom of the hill.
The Shoulder to the Boulder
On a blistering hot day in the fall of 1995 I stood on a hillside overlooking the site of the mythical King Sisyphus' domain, the ancient citadel of Corinth. The old grounds looked as parched as I felt at the ungodly hour of high noon. I was leading a tour around Greece for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Our Greek expert was an elderly professor named Adrianna. She found a bit of shade for us underneath a gnarled olive tree and began the session with a brilliant history of Corinth, but then delivered a surprisingly conservative version of the Sisyphus tale, tinged with a slight sense of condescension, as if telling a fairy tale to a group of schoolkids she was sure had never heard the myth before.
Adrianna may have had the best of intentions, to simply entertain the group for a few minutes in between the hotel, the ruins, and lunch, but I found her approach to be the kind that had earned mythology its reputation for being charming but irrelevant. Told like this, I thought to myself, a myth is a lie, irrelevant, untrue to the way people live now.
As I stepped forward for my turn to talk, the group shuffled around uncomfortably. A few of them took desultory photographs of the archaeologists at work in the ruins of the old citadel below. Adrianna nervously checked her watch, then clicked at it with her finger, as if to signal me that we were short on time. Remember, she was reminding me, we still have half the Peloponnese to see today.
Unwilling to be rushed, I leaned against the chained link fence that surrounds the excavations of the agora, then began by saying, “Many things change over the centuries, but the one thing that never changes is human character. That's why the old myths are still so fascinating to us today. They reveal the inner meaning of human life, what they used to call ‘the workings of the soul,’ the realm that defies time and space. As I see it, myths like this are metaphors for the dramas of our inward life, and the story of Sisyphus is a metaphor for struggle itself. On the outside, this is a tale of betrayal and retribution, but on the inside, the domain of myth, it tells us something about our attitude to struggle we can't seem to learn any other way.”
Slowly I spun my version of the myth.
Sisyphus, ruler of Corinth, regarded by Homer as the wisest and most prudent in his relationships with other mortals, was also, according to other ancient sources, rather a wise guy in his relationships with the gods.
One afternoon, Sisyphus chanced upon Zeus en flagrante delicto with the lovely maiden Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus. Before Sisyphus could even conjure up any judgments, he watched as the mighty god abducted the poor girl. As one might imagine, Asopus, the god of flowing water, was inconsolable over her disappearance. Asopus was so distraught he approached the king for help. Sisyphus felt compromised between his loyalty to the gods and the truth he witnessed, but the cisterns of his citadel were dry. So Sisyphus risked everything by trading a divine secret for a perennial spring, chancing retribution for an act of compassion for his own citizens.
The fury of Asopus was so great that when he learned the true source of his daughter's sorrow, he went into a rage. The rivers around Corinth roiled. The banks overflowed, nearly drowning Zeus, who was hiding from his outraged wife Hera, and who narrowly escaped by disguising himself as a large stone so the waters would run off the slope of his back.
Zeus soon discovered who had betrayed his pawky little secret, and he turned to his brother Hades for help, hoping to render Sisyphus invisible by having him hauled down to the underworld. As usual, he wanted to get rid of all the evidence of his incorrigible philandering.
Once immured in the dark underworld, Sisyphus was restless and unwilling to accept the justice of his fate. As his name in Greek suggests, he is “the crafty one” who devised a clever ruse to chain Hades, the Dark One, to his own stone throne. Strange to say, with the god of death literally enchained, the gravediggers were out of work. No one was dying in the world above. This gravely upset Ares, the god of war, whose love of igniting the desire for battle in men's hearts was now thwarted. Zeus soon learned that he had been twice scorned by the pesky Sisyphus, and he reluctantly agreed to allow Ares to rescue Hades from his humiliating predicament.
Meanwhile, Sisyphus called upon Persephone, the half-time bride of Hades, cajoling her with a mournful tale of longing for his wife Merope (who is immortalized as the seventh—and invisible—sister in the Pleiades constellation) and the need for him to fulfill his duties as a husband and father.
“Let me return to Corinth for three days,” he pleaded. “I am a king. Let me arrange a funeral so my family can properly grieve.”
Persephone was either duped by this clever sob story or else simply empathized with a fellow soul who had been unfairly seized and sentenced. She agreed to guide Sisyphus out of the dank caverns of the underworld and back into the overworld, where Sisyphus paid his respects to his wife and family and the people of his kingdom. But once he had escaped the underworld, and as the ancients said, smelled once more the fresh air of the living world, he had a change of heart and refused to accept the terms of parole. When Hades came calling for him to return to the underworld, instead Sisyphus chose the “sun, warm
